 If you're still holding onto the hope that you will get rich writing books, this might not be the video for you. What's shaking? My name's Ken. Welcome back to another video. So a long while ago I promised that I would make an in-depth video going into all of the costs and the profits involved with publishing my psychological horror book, Welcome Descent. I want to break down exactly how much I spent publishing this, and exactly how much I've made back so far. I published it about 8 months ago and the reason I've waited so long to do this is because I wanted to give it a bit of time first just to see how the sales went, that kind of thing. I published it through IngramSpark and there's a lot of stuff I did, right? But of course there's a bunch of stuff that I wish I'd done differently as well. I will say straight off the bat that I didn't market this book nearly as much as I probably should have. Even on this YouTube channel I don't feel like I've really pushed it that hard and to be honest, I don't mind. I think that's kind of a good thing. The purpose of this channel isn't just to be a billboard for my books. Anyway, I'm not bummed about that. I just think it's worth noting before we start talking figures. I want to make one thing very, very clear. I never suspected that I would make a big profit off of this. To be honest I had it in my head that I probably wouldn't even break even with how much I'd spent publishing it. I mean it would be sick obviously if it blew up and I got rich and famous from it, sure. But at the end of the day I just wanted to write a story that I was proud of and let people who are interested read it. I've done that so no matter how much I make back from this I'm still kind of proud of myself. Anyway, let's start talking numbers. First of all I'm going to go through all of the individual things that I paid for to get this book published. That way at the end we can combine it for a total figure. I haven't actually done this before so this is probably, it's probably going to sting. We'll start with the necessary stuff. For example cover design. Luckily this wasn't a very complex cover to design. Because it is somewhat minimalist the only thing the artist really had to do was illustrate the centerpiece graphic there and some other little pieces here and there. And then once we had all of them I was actually the one who shifted them all into place and then we had this. So the cover illustrations all of the art ended up costing me about 130 Australian dollars. I did that through Fiverr. It was super easy, super simple, not sponsored. Again, if it were a fantasy book or something like that I probably would have wanted a much more complex or much more intricate illustration for the cover and that would have cost a lot more. But with the story involved with Welcome Descent it just made a lot more sense to keep it simple. The story is all about isolation and emptiness. So it didn't make sense to have a really complex cover. Next up and the most expensive part of the entire process I'm sure was the professional proof reading and editing. I did this step through theexperteditor.com.au. That's just probably one of the best I was able to find online as far as affordability goes. So with editing for your story, if you're getting it done by experienced professionals it's always going to be very expensive. Unfortunately, that's as unavoidable as a mullet on an essay. Now normally the price comes down entirely to word counts. So for about an 80,000 word novel, which is pretty standard, I spent $2,177. Keep in mind that wasn't just for proof reading, that was also for editing and full critique. They go through the story and find any loopholes, anything that might be confusing for the reader and just basically give you a bunch of tips and advice on stuff to make it more high quality really. That is a lot of money, but at the end of the day I am glad that I spent it. I can tell you right now my story was much better after I worked with those guys than it was beforehand. And when it comes to a story that you've poured, you know, years of your life and your passion into, it really is a small price to pay to make sure it's as good as it can possibly be. Even if it means living off meagering noodles for a while. So next up was the cost that I wasn't entirely happy with. I've complained about it in videos before, but it really just comes down to IngramSpark twisting your balls. So I published Welcome Descent as a paperback, a hardcover and also as an e-book. I did all of that through IngramSpark, all three versions of the book. So that's $49 for the hardcover and the e-book combined and then another $49 for the paperback. That's $98 just for these three separate versions of the book to be uploaded and published. And you know what, fair enough, I'm cool with that. Here's the issue though. After I uploaded all that stuff, I found that there was a little error in the manuscript. And I also found when I got the proof copy back that there was a few little things with the cover that I had to mess around with. That stuff that you would only really find out after you actually get the physical proof copy. So I had to fix those issues and then re-upload them again. You'd think, oh, you're just re-uploading some files. The book hasn't even been printed or sold yet. No big deal, right? Wrong. I had to pay the entire complete fee all over again. I had to pay the $98 again just to make a few very minor digital changes. And I think that is fucking silly. If there was like a little fee for re-uploading your stuff, I would still think it's kind of silly, but I would understand, I'd be okay with that. But having to pay the complete cost of uploading your files all over again, it's silly. There's no reason. So anyway, in the end, I ended up paying about $196 to IngramSpark to upload these three versions of the book. The re-uploading fees along with IngramSpark constantly putting my book in the wrong categories on Amazon, along with the complicated monthly reports that they send you along with the almost completely missing support staff. I can't really recommend IngramSpark. I just, as it is right now, I just don't think they're very good. In future, I'll probably self-publish entirely through KDP. And I guess if I want a hardcover for a future book, I'll just do that one version of the book through IngramSpark. Until such a time that KDP, for whatever reason, finally start printing hardcovers as well. So those are all the necessary publishing costs. The ones that can't really be avoided when publishing your book, but I will also include all of the extra stuff, the stuff I did for far-northa marketing. Audio narration of the entire first chapter of the book, which is available on YouTube for free, by the way, was about $466 for about an hour of audio or about 6,000-ish words, which is actually pretty damn cheap when it comes to audiobook narrations. I also had an entirely original song composed just for the book trailer for Welcome to Scent, which is super unnecessary, I know. But it slaps, so it's okay. That was $199 and is also on YouTube. I ran a Facebook ad for the book that ran for about two weeks when it launched with a $60 budget. It reached almost 20,000 people with 250 clicks on the link. I have no idea how many of those translated into actual sales, if any, but assuming that, let's say, generously, 10% of the people who clicked the link bought the book, it would still barely make the $60 back, so, nah. Another really small cost was the ISBNs or the barcodes for the two physical copies, but I bought a pack of 10 ISBNs a really long time ago for like 80 bucks, so I'm not gonna count the ISBNs just because I already had them waiting. And especially considering you can get ISBNs included for free with most print-on-demand publishers, although I still would recommend buying your own so you're not locked in with that publisher. I also won't count the physical copies of the book that I bought for myself and my family. That's not really relevant, but yeah, there it is. There's pretty much all of the money I spent on publishing my book, Welcome to Scent, and the grand total comes to $3,228 Australian dollars. Now that is obviously a lot of money, but only about two and a half grand of that, I would say was necessary. Although marketing is important, all of the other costs were pretty much just for marketing, and marketing is important, and technically, I still didn't do nearly enough marketing as it is, so in a way, that number should probably be even higher. Let's move on to how much money I actually made back. This will be a lot more straightforward. I have two reports, one for the e-books and one for the physical copies. Between the release of Welcome to Scent back in January and right now, I have sold exactly 65 copies of Welcome to Scent as an e-book for a profit of $159.71. As for physical copies, to date, I have sold exactly 49 hardcovers and 94 paperbacks for a total of $266.23. Now, before I do the final math on this, I just wanna say that having my book be bought 208 times is absolutely fantastic. That's genuinely a lot more than I expected, so either way, I'm happy with those numbers. I'm ecstatic, actually. It really does mean the world to me that that many people were interested enough to spend money on a story that I was trying to tell. But with that out of the way, let's get this over with $3,228 in costs, minus $425.94 in profit, equals a total of $2,802.06 lost on this venture so far. Keeping in mind the profit as well is before tax, so you know, if you thought I was in this for the money, you are wrong. If you ever wondered why I haven't had a full audio book made for welcome to send, that is why. Yeah, I feel like I've sold a lot of books. A couple of hundred books is not a small deal, at least to me. But I also kept the profit margin for my books very slim. I tried to make them almost as cheap as they could possibly be, that IngramSpark would allow me to make them, because it was more important to me that people had access to my book and could read my book rather than me trying to make a big profit off of it. I'm not trying to sound noble or high and mighty or anything like that, that's just the truth. It's my dream to be able to quit my full-time job and write and make online content full-time. That would be amazing, but that's probably just not in the cards for me. It is what it is. I would really, really hope that you don't see this as a story of failure, just because I've spent a lot, a lot more on this book than I've made back. And please don't let it discourage you from pursuing writing as a career. Like I said, I barely marketed this book. It probably could have done a lot better if I did more advertising and marketing. And there's plenty of people who do make a big profit self-publishing their stuff. A lot of people on YouTube that do. But at the end of the day, if your top priority is money rather than telling a story that you want people to read, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment. I'm gonna keep writing and making books and I'm sure I'll get better at selling them as time goes on. But if I can keep entertaining more than a handful of people at a time with made-up stories from my brain, I'm all good. Also, it's really important to keep in mind that while sales may be slow over time when you're just starting out, and while they may slow down as time goes on, the more books you put out, the more your income stacks. After enough time, you're not just making a bit of profit from this book, you're also making a bit of profit from this book and this book and this book and this book. And when you put it together, you might be making a nice little side hustle. In the long run, especially once your stories get a bit of a fan base, you can see big losses like mine start to chip away and eventually turn into an actual profit. Please. Anyway, I hope this video was fun to watch. I know the end result wasn't necessarily a success story, but at the very least, you should have a bit of insight now into the costs first, the profits for self-publishing. But hey, have you self-published before? Have you made a profit? Let me know. Thanks so much for watching and if this is your first time here, thanks for sticking around to the end. I make lots of writing videos, so hopefully I will see you in the next one. Catch ya.